I wish Apple could figure out something like Proton for MacOS. It feels like a relatively small investment in this area could unlock a huge catalogue of classic games. It's the only thing I feel I'm missing by switching from Linux.
This is true. Worthy of note: this toolkit was released fairly recently and there hasn’t been much time yet for commercial game devs to consider using it. Here’s hoping they do.
It's against the terms to use the kit directly - the kit is intended to be a porting aid, not an emulation/compatibility layer. Which unfortunately ensured it won't be used much until Apple sees the light and changes the terms.
What's stopping you now? Apple's devkit for game porting already allows you to run many Windows games without modifications. They've essentially taken Proton and implemented their own proprietary Vulkan backend.
I wouldn't expect too much from Apple in terms of game compatibility (they'd much rather see developers port games and sell them in the App Store). Traditionally, they have put very little care into video games on their desktop grade machines.
You could probably write a lutris-like Game Porting Toolkit wrapper, I imagine you may be able to make some cash off of that too.
> Traditionally, they have put very little care into video games on their desktop grade machines.
MacOS got lots of OpenGL fixes around 2010 when Steam for Mac launched. Problem was most Macs at the time didn't have competitive graphics hardware so unless you had a Mac Pro only older games ran properly.
The M series GPUs still aren't very powerful gaming chips, especially for their price range and the very high resolutions macOS is built for.
The Mac wasn't really built for gaming and there's nothing wrong with that. Sadly, that does make me believe that Apple won't put serious effort into cross platform gaming like Valve has done on Linux; they will probably bring out porting tools every now and then, but I don't think they'll make game compatibility a first class citizen like Valve has done for Linux. If that was their intention, they wouldn't have put the distribution restrictions on their game porting toolkit.
I'm not sure how a Vulkan-to-Metal translation engine is supposed to help with porting, though; including a custom Wine build makes sense, but without Apple's Vulkan/DX translation layers you won't get much out of Wine directly. It's also not as if the toolkit spits out code that'll turn Vulkan calls into Metal calls. The whole thing just feels like a proof of concept to me, a demonstration in the sense of "look at the 30-60fps you can get on low-medium settings on our hardware!" rather than an intent to actually port existing games to macOS.
